April 2012 Entry: Gladiator

[Jacktannery]

This is my first ever mapping challenge! I hope I am not being too ambitious.

My idea is to create a roman amphitheatre battlemap, but to have various sub-maps that show the battle arena changing round by round as it gets flooded, and the combatants need to swim and then climb on to and fight over boats.

This will probably turn into a disaster because the one thing I know for a fact I absolute cannot do, is water. I just can’t do water at all. Nevertheless, I will try.

And I also want to add an elephent. But I also have no idea how I am going to do that.

The first issue will be scale: I want to show enough to get a sense that the fight is inside an amphitheatre (but I won't try and depict an audience - that would be almost impossible for me), but the entire structure can’t be depicted because it would dominate the map and not leave enough room for the battle arena.

I am very much hoping for feedback and advice on this throughout the process. Also if anyone knows of any existing colosseum/amphitheatre battlemaps out there (surely there must be loads) please let me know so I can get ideas.

Grid will be 100 pixels and map will be 20 squares x 20 squares (thus 2,000 pixels by 2,000 – which is the limit my computer can take before crashing. May have to make it slightly smaller due to computer power – we’ll see.



EDIT: scale concept (with grid at 50 pixels and width of image 2000 pixels):
### LATEST WIP ###


Questions: is ratio of arena/battleground to audience tiers about right, or not? Is the arena/battlefield big enough (ie enough grid squares) to have a ship battle in it? Probably not - perhaps mini-ships?